Patent Application
20090019119
The present invention relates generally to systems and, more specifically, to improvements to systems to an enhancement to electronic mail programs, messaging and collaboration programs that scan the sender's message text and determines that the sender intended to attach one or more attachments or include one or more external references, but no attachment(s) or reference(s) has been included, and warns the user before sending.
Many times, users of email will send along attachments, such as a photo or sound file, or external references, such as a URL, to their respective email messages. Or, sometimes, the email senders will intend to include an attachment(s)—but in their haste to send the email—forget to perform the steps necessary to include the attachment(s) or external reference(s). For instance, for the Microsoft Outlook email client, the steps required are:
Other email clients, such as IBM's Lotus Notes business e-mail and collaboration client, include similar type necessary steps to include attachments or external references to (or in) an e-mail or other collaborative messages.
However, there is a problem in that many people using electronic mail programs and other messaging/collaboration systems intend to attach files or other attachments or include external references such as URLs, but often forget to do this. This mistake is often not discovered and corrected until hours/days later when recipients reply with “missing attachment” comments. This leads to frustration and “oops!” emails. In a commercial relationship, sending a customer an email missing an attachment is more than just frustrating and embarrassing, but casts a negative impression of the enterprise in the customer's mind, which can have financial consequences.
Most present systems use only a pure keyword/phrase exact match search to detect missing attachment intent, such as Microsoft Outlook Attachment Alarm—see http://www.office-addins.com/-outlook-addins/outlook-attachment-alarm.html). These systems examine, or scan, the email for keywords such as “Attachment” and, if they find the word “attachment” and no attachment is present, they notify the sender that that attachment is missing. Some include features whereby the user or the system can adjust keyword lists based on heuristics and experience. Others are a little more sophisticated to determine the number of intended attachments, again, based solely on simple keyword identification and simple syntactic clues (e.g., the presence of a number before a keyword as in “Here are 3 files”.)
There needs to be a system for detecting whether a sender of a collaboration message intends to include one or more attachments (such as a picture) or one or more external references (such as an URL), for determining whether the attachment(s) and/or external reference(s) are attached, for determining whether the attachment(s) and/or external reference(s) were indeed attached and, if not, notifying the sender.
The present invention provides a system and method to provide an enhancement to electronic mail programs, messaging and collaboration programs that scan the sender's message text and determines that the sender intended to attach one or more attachment(s) and/or external reference(s), but no attachment(s) and/or external reference(s) has been included, and warns the user before sending. The system and method identify variants of typical phraseology such as “attached is . . . ”, “Here is . . . ”, “This file . . . ”, “take a look at this . . . ”, etc., and determines that it was likely that the user meant to attach or refer to something.
The illustrative aspects of the present invention are designed to solve one or more of the problems herein described and/or one or more other problems not discussed.
These and other features of the invention will be more readily understood from the following detailed description of the various aspects of the invention taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings that depict various embodiments of the invention, in which:
The drawings are intended to depict only typical aspects of the invention, and therefore should not be considered as limiting the scope of the invention. In the drawings, like numbering represent like elements between the drawings.
The present invention provides a system and method to electronic mail programs, messaging and collaboration programs that scan the sender's message text and determines that the sender intended to attach one or more attachment(s) or include one or more external reference(s), but no attachment(s) or reference(s) has been included, and warns the user before sending. The capability can also be extended to any messaging system (e.g., instant messaging) and collaboration system.
The system and method identify variants of typical phraseology such as “attached is . . . ”, “Here is . . . ”, “This file . . . ”, “take a look at this . . . ”, etc., and determines that it was likely that the user meant to attach or refer to something. The feature can be a user-selectable option whether to check for missing attachments/references. This feature could also be incorporated into mail-scanning “rules engines” as a term in a rule, such as “<message contents suggests attachment(s)> AND <number of attachments> EQUALS 0”.
The foregoing description of various aspects of the invention has been presented for purposes of illustration and description. It is not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the invention to the precise form disclosed, and obviously, many modifications and variations are possible. Such modifications and variations that may be apparent to an individual in the art are included within the scope of the invention as defined by the accompanying claims.
